Matt Gross: Road Tripping Across America, Frugally
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 05.23.07 | 6:03 PM ET
When I last touched base with Matt Gross, Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times, he’d just completed a 90-day, around-the-world trip spanning “3 continents, 17 languages and approximately 900 varieties of dumplings.” Last week he embarked on another epic journey, this one a road trip from New York to Seattle during which he’ll zig-zag through almost every state in the U.S. He’ll do it Blue Highways-style: driving backroads. Gross will be filing stories and videos from the road every Wednesday throughout the summer for the Times. His first installment, which includes a visit to an outdoor marketplace in Mebane, North Carolina known as “Little Mexico,” appears today.
Gross was in Raleigh, N.C. when I caught up with him via e-mail to ask him about his trip. “Blue Highways,” he said, was a source of inspiration, but also of complication. ‘It’s such a damn great book, with so many wonderful characters and destinations, that I have to hold back from simply retracing William Least Heat-Moon’s footsteps,” he wrote. “Of course, I have to deliver more practical information than he did, but I keep wishing ‘Blue Highways’ was my own little secret. Oh well.”
Related on World Hum:
* Oprah Winfrey, Amanda Congdon and the New Golden Age of the Cross-Country Road Trip
* The 50th Anniversary of the Interstate System: Where Have the Big Roads Taken Us?
* The Interstates and ‘That William Least Heat-Moon Problem of the Intellectual Wayfarer’
* Video: A Cross-Country Road Trip Captured in Time Lapse